Its a place undefined in time, a location that no one would ever willingly travel to. Are we there yet? The answer is yes. But its going to take 7 to 8 years for the reality to sink in.

Sunday, October 04, 2015

Vladimir Putin the Pragmatist

Syria is in the midst of a civil war and you hear stuff like “Bashar al-Assad has murdered thousands.” Kind of wonder what the headline would have been back in 1866 for our Civil War; “Lincoln murders 200,000.”
If the Russians can keep Bashar al-Assad in power, they have an ally in the Middle East that can help defeat ISIS. This guy is not jumping in a plane and leaving the country in fear of his life. Every foreign leader that our country has supported in the past is probably now living somewhere in Virginia.

In this case with Syria, the Russians offer stability and preservation of the political system. It’s not like the US where we invade and promise Democracy and then sneak out. Then we have to give refugee status to all of those who would be executed for collaboration on our exit.

If the civil war can be ended and the region becomes stable, people can move back to Syria. The present projected conditions are tragic. 4 million people are in the process of moving into Europe. When countries say that they can accommodate 20,000 over 5 years, what happens this year to the 4 million when the winter arrives? Logistically, how do you provide food and shelter on such a large scale?

Putin has a realistic approach to the problem. Stabilize Syria and get the refugees back into their own country, stem the emigration to Europe. Bashar al-Assad is not associated with a religious agenda that needs to be implemented which is a good thing.

Obama might not like what the Russians are doing, but the United States created this whole mess and if you have someone who is a strong leader that will fight, I say support them. 4 million people have a home that they would like to come back to, Political ideals like Democracy are for the idle rich, not the poor peasants who can ill afford it. Syria can come back just like Egypt.

Putin has no love for Democracy, maybe he realizes that it is a very ineffective form of government for people who are extremely poor. Move a family in Syria living on $200 a month to Europe and you find that they now need $800 per week to survive. Give the people stability and security in their own country and you recreate an economic engine for survival that will work again and revitalize Syria.

Consider Vladimir Putin as a pragmatist with a realistic solution for Syria. Of course we could step up to the plate, we already have 40 million on food stamps in this country, adding 4 million more to the program might even stimulate our economy.

6 comments:

AIM
said...

Putin found a perfect opportunity to shore up and restore Assad to power, prevent the Saudis from running their pipeline into Europe, and put a microscope on why the USA is ineffective in their "fight against terrorism" (i.e. the USA has the ulterior motive of toppling the Assad regime, via the CIA hiring terrorist groups to act as their surrogate army). It is a chess game between sociopaths and Putin is obviously the better chess player. Obama is a weak, ineffective, puppet (with Marxist ideologies) who is greatly contributing to the destruction of our country. The puppet masters behind this puppet are insane and have put us on a runaway train to disaster.

If you look at Iraq, our installed Democracy was busy looting the country while 100 ISIS fanatics cutting off heads panicked the Army.

Politics aside, stability is easier from a dictatorship than from any collective form of government. I see Syria and Assad surviving. Without order, a country of that size will starve to death. You don't need fighters when it comes to food, you need farmers.

Nobody thinks about the obvious, your starving and it takes 8 months to grow a crop. Do you plant on the hope you will be left alone to harvest it? Or not plant because you'd be shot by some hungry soldier when the crop came in?

We lost 620,000 soldiers in our civil war, far more than we lost in WWI and WWII combined. Syria has about 100k soldiers dead and the rest are innocent civilians. Assad has no reason to pick on civilians. His people are fleeing the country because of the cruelty of the other side fighting him.

I think in todays world where ISIS soldiers don't put on uniforms and hide behind masks, use car bombs and execute the men and rape the women, chemical weapons make sense. My wife has several poison gas containers for killing 6 and 8 legged creatures. You want to make sure they all die for their crimes and that none escape their just deserts.

The USA's foreign policy in the Middle East is really backfiring now. Our nation-building/imperialist/meddling/military-industrial-complex/corporatocracy oriented approach of these many decades is blowing up in our faces. Hopefully the manipulators behind all of this will be exposed to some degree due to their failures and be vanquished from public office or from being adjuncts to those in office. America has turned into a very bad actor. Hopefully, when the Millenials move in to the position of running our governments and institutions we will turn back towards the good. The Boomers and the generation before them have made a terrible mess of things. When they die off and are out of government and economics things should improve. Don't know how much I'll see of this in my lifetime. I'm 63.